Pantomime season

Russell Brand visits Scrooge

Being rather ill and in some pain this Christmas Day I heard much more of BBC Radio 4 than I intended to, and it wouldn't at all be in the spirit of A Christmas Carol if I didn't acknowledge that I actually very much enjoyed most of what I heard.

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As far as Radio 4 is concerned I really do wish it could be Christmas everyday. It was an exceptional day's broadcasting, this Christmas Day.

Over the past year, however, my abiding affection for the station (despite all the bias) has taken a palpable hit. Why? Because I've felt that Radio 4 has changed for the worse and become even more boring, predictable and earnest. Even in 2015 I'd still be able to find a few unexpected gems almost every day in Radio 4 schedule. This year even finding one has frequently proved hard, and it's not just because too many programmes look to have an agenda or find their origins in an agenda and because that worthiness has at times become all-consuming; it's simply that BBC Radio 4 has become much duller in 2016.

Well, that's how I feel anyhow.

Still, I wasn't meant to be moaning here. I come to praise BBC Radio 4 yesterday not to bury it.

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My day actually started with BBC One's broadcast of midnight mass from Birmingham's Roman Catholic cathedral, St. Chad's (the first Catholic cathedral in England since the Reformation, completed just 12 years after Catholics were emancipated by the Duke of Wellington's government) - a lovely public service performed by the BBC for those too lazy, not religious enough or too ill to go in person to a nocturnal mass but who'd still like to be there in spirit. Not being a Catholic, it was a new experience for me - albeit, in the end, not that new (having had a high Anglican upbringing). It helped, however, that the choir was topnotch and the music performed (familiar carols, late Renaissance polyphony, a lovely mass by a late 19th Century composer) was absolutely gorgeous too.

The BBC is always good at broadcasting such things, giving us lots of shots from different viewing points of the magnificent Pugin-designed building as well as the priests, choir and congregation, thus allowing us to be awed and to gawp at all manner of people. 

I spent quite some time matching up the members of the clergy and choir to well-known people, for example. I was particularly taken by pre-Raphaelite TV historian Kate Williams, here pictured next to Birds of a Feather star Linda Robson:

Linda Robson and Kate Williams

As I sign that I must be a political nerd one of the male choristers struck me as being a moonlighting Professor Timothy Garton Ash. The presiding bishop was Archbishop Bernard Longley, who - by a happy coincidence - had something of the look of Harold Bishop from Neighbours about him.

I only wish they could have found a way to allow us to smell all the incense too. Will be ever get beyond 'scratch and sniff' cards?

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Being a Catholic service there were bells as well as smells, tinkling out (for the second time) as the Eucharist bread and chalice were raised. I have to say though that the bells of Durham Cathedral, ringing out on Radio 4's Bells on Sunday a few hours later. were much more Godly to my (lapsed) Anglican ears. Goodness gracious, Great Bells of Fire! 

They rang out what the programme's website called 'Grandsire Caters' and which the BBC announcer pronounced (assuredly correctly) as 'Grandsir Caters'. These BBC announcers do check up on the pronunciations - unless they are so posh that they already know that such things should be pronounced in such ways. In fact, I bet that BBC presenter pronounces 'garage' to rhyme with 'Nigel Farage' rather than the way I'd pronounce it, to rhyme with 'Fridgemaster MUL49102 Undercounter larder fridge'.

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Cardinal Wolsey, from a painting by Hans Holbein

Talking about 'posh', Edward Stourton presented this week's Sunday from Cardinal Wolsey's old haunt Hampton Court Palace to mark the dawn of the Reformation next very year by examining the state of religion in England in the early years of Henry VIII. 

Now that's my kind of Sunday. I loved it from start to finish. (Best episode ever!)

It was Out with the liberal hand-wringing, the social work/socialist worker campaigns, the SJW bishops, the endless parade of offended Muslims, the interfaith bromides, all the interminable stuff about Anglican infighting and the infallible paeans to Pope Francis, etc, etc, and In with Ed Stourton trying Tudor-style Plum Possett (and rather enjoying its unique sweet-and-sour flavours of meat and fruit, despite not at all liking the look of its brown sludge in the bowl) and well-informed, enthusiastic historians talking about the church calendar and why the Reformation in England didn't just start because 'Enery wanted to get his leg-over with saucy Anne! Plus there was Catherine Bott on Christmas carols and some beautiful performances of Christmas carols by St Martin's Voices, ending with a favourite carol of mine, The Coventry Carol. 

To be particularly nerdy, I particularly enjoyed hearing about the 1515 Sarum Missal, whose post-Brexit break from Rome saw the name of the Pope (every mention of 'Papa' - of which there were many) scribbled out. The Missal itself, however, continued to be used throughout Henry's 'English Catholic' reign, showing where the red-meat loving monarch's theological inclinations lay (and, no, they didn't just lay next to Miss Boleyn).

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Archbishop 'Nosy' Parker (inventor of the Parker pen, the parka coat and the Anglican Church as we know it)

Straying away from yesterday to today, I'd just like to add that anyone who enjoyed being taken back to Tudor England by Ed Stourton would probably have just as equally enjoyed being taken back to Tudor England by this morning's Start the Week where Andrew Marr put politics and left-wing concerns aside and talked about the medieval manuscript collection gathered together by Elizabeth I's first Archbishop of Canterbury and pioneer Brexiteer Matthew Parker, about Elizabethan jigs, and about errors (deliberate or otherwise) in maps throughout history.

Those Elizabethan jigs - about which I'd never heard before - were short plays written to be performed as light relief after the main dramatic event. I'm imaging the groundlings sobbing at Romeo and Juliet before being sent away laughing by Ye Little Britayne ("Verily but nay sir but verily but nay sir but..."). Less than ten survive, as they were largely an oral tradition, but they were apparently very bawdy.

High art they don't seem to have been however. Lucie Skeaping say that one of the libellous ones came about because some man wanted to marry the well-off, pretty daughter of his neighbour but got turned down so a jig was penned and performed around town suggesting that the family of the pretty daughter was a no-good family and the daughter was no better than she ought to be. We only have the play - as you might guess - because the courts recorded it when the offended family took to the law.

Not mentioned was the fact that Archbishop Parker was the man for whose psalter the treasurable Tudor composer Thomas Tallis wrote his nine surpassingly lovely psalm settings - one of which formed the basis for Vaughan Williams's must-loved Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis....which gives me all the excuse I need to post the following video featuring the Tallis Scholars:

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Other Christmas Day gem on Radio 4 was With Great Pleasure at Christmas featuring Armstong (Alexander) & Miller (Ben), still friends after they went their separate ways, despite Xander never having been heard of ever again - just as Clare Balding, Toby Jones and Owen Jones appear to have disappeared from the BBC in recent years. (Whatever happened to them?). 

There were rumbustious folk song renditions from the boys, plus poetry and prose of the highest quality - and the lowest quality. 

As for poetry we had Thomas Hardy's ever-haunting The Darkling Thrush and William Topaz McGonagall's slightly-less-haunting A Christmas Carol (though I'm a huge McGonagall fan. His complete collection of poetic gems sits in front of me every day and makes me forever think of the Silvery Tay and the central girders of its ill-fated railway bridge which the Storm Fiend did blow away on the last Sabbath day of 1879. O if only they'd been supported on each side with buttresses!). As everyone loves a Christmas quiz, please try to work out which is which here (and Google them if you're unsure):

(a) I leant upon a coppice gate/When Frost was spectre-grey,/And Winter's dregs made desolate/The weakening eye of day./The tangled bine-stems scored the sky/Like strings of broken lyres,/And all mankind that haunted nigh/Had sought their household fires.  

(b) For each new morn to the Christian is dear,/As well as the morn of the New Year,/And he thanks God for the light of each new morn./Especially the morn that Christ was born.

As for prose, we had Dickens of course and Alan Coren being very funny about men shopping at Christmas and a piece of AA Milne....

More Rabbit than Sainsbury's (rather like this post)

.....that made me realise (as I've not read AA since I was six) that Mr Milne really was a very clever and funny writer:

So [Pooh] bent down, put his head into the hole, and called out:
"Is anybody at home?"
There was a sudden scuffling noise from inside the hole, and then silence.
"What I said was, 'Is anybody at home?'" called out Pooh very loudly.
"No!" said a voice; and then added, "You needn't shout so loud. I heard you quite well the first time."
"Bother!" said Pooh. "Isn't there anybody here at all?"
"Nobody."
Winnie-the-Pooh took his head out of the hole, and thought for a little, and he thought to himself, "There must be somebody there, because somebody must have said 'Nobody.'" So he put his head back in the hole, and said: "Hallo, Rabbit, isn't that you ?"
"No," said Rabbit, in a different sort of voice this time.
"But isn't that Rabbit's voice?"
"I don't think so," said Rabbit. "It isn't meant to be."
"Oh!" said Pooh.
He took his head out of the hole, and had another think, and then he put it back, and said:
"Well, could you very kindly tell me where Rabbit is?"
"He has gone to see his friend Pooh Bear, who is a great friend of his."
"But this is Me!" said Bear, very much surprised.
"What sort of Me?"
"Pooh Bear."
"Are you sure?" said Rabbit, still more surprised.
"Quite, quite sure," said Pooh.
"Oh, well, then, come in."
So Pooh pushed and pushed and pushed his way through the hole, and at last he got in.
"You were quite right," said Rabbit, looking at him all over. "It is you. Glad to see you."
"Who did you think it was?"
"Well, I wasn't sure. You know how it is in the Forest. One can't have anybody coming into one's house. One has to be careful. What about a mouthful of something?"
Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o'clock in the morning, and he was very glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and mugs; and when Rabbit said, "Honey or condensed milk with your bread?" he was so excited that he said, "Both," and the n, so as not to seem greedy, he added, "But don't bother about the bread, please." And for a long time after that he said nothing . . . until at last, humming to himself in a rather sticky voice, he got up, shook Rabbit lovingly by the paw, and said that he must be going on.
"Must you?" said Rabbit politely
"Well," said Pooh, "I could stay a little longer if it--if you----" and he tried very hard to look in the direction of the larder.

That how the audience laughing, and it had me laughing.

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Jokes, whether of the Barry Cryer parrot variety or the AA Milne rabbit and bear variety, were wholly absent from Radio 4's Christmas short story - The Sons of Upland Farm by Orcadian bard George Mackay Brown.

This was a half-timeless parable of considerable depth and beauty, grim but glowing. The ending rather took my breath away - in the sense that I needed to take a sharp intake of breath after it dawned on my what was being alluded to. (No spoilers you'll note!)

It was good to hear some George Mackay Brown. He's been mainly just a name for me, mostly associated with the composer Peter Maxwell Davies. (Their shared three-part names must surely have brought them together. I can think of no other reason.)

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Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show!

It followed Count Arthur Strong's Radio Show! and if you thought George's short story was grim, well this had to be heard to be believed....

It was a distressing tale of an alcoholic old man apparently suffering from dementia and other mental health issues (including disillusions of grandeur) who behaved in a terrible way to his friends and , in the course of this episode, exploited and upset a young boy in a desperate attempt to earn some money to feed his alcohol addiction by creating a Japanese-themed reindeer park.

O the humanity!

(I feel that the above was written in the true spirit of Radio 4 and the Guardian. Down with laughter! If it's not about 'Trump 'n' Farage' it's a right-wing ploy!).

((And, for the sake of internet clarity, the above was a Polly Toynbee-style spoof. I do like my Count Arthur. He's the funniest alcoholic, dementia-suffering, mentally-disturbed man on Radio 4.))

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HM the Queen did a lovely little programme at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. She spoke so beautifully. (It's a shame we don't hear the Queen's English so much on the BBC these days. The Queen is the nearest thing I've heard to it on Radio 4 for yonks). She said:

Jesus Christ lived obscurely for most of his life, and never travelled far. He was maligned and rejected by many, though he had done no wrong. And yet, billions of people now follow his teaching and find in him the guiding light for their lives. I am one of them because Christ’s example helps me see the value of doing small things with great love, whoever does them and whatever they themselves believe. The message of Christmas reminds us that inspiration is a gift to be given as well as received, and that love begins small but always grows.

That's lovely. I do hope it catches on and that she does another one next year. She's much better than Will Self.

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Prince Charles (l) with some woman (c) and Camilla (r)

Her son, HRH the Prince of Wales, had been on Radio 4 less than two hours earlier. He did a comic turn, marking some 50 years of the programme by (and this will have pleased the BBC) fulsomely singing the programme's praises on Just a Minute's Christmas panto special. Nicholas Parsons and Paul Merton played straight men to the prince (Paul being surprisingly forelock-tugging given his years of anti-royal sneers on HIGNFY).

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And at this point I'm losing focus and the will to live. So that's enough of that!

Summoned by Bells

And now for something completely different (sorry)...

St. Peter's Church, Heysham

I love church bells. I love bells on Sunday, and Radio 4's Bells on Sunday. 

Bells rarely sound melancholy to me - even the ones I heard last Sunday, floating over the fields from St. John's Church, Silverdale. 

We were busy sticking our family nose into the garden of the late Victoria Wood's old house, situated on an out-of-the-way lane leading down to a lovely cove overlooking Morecambe Bay (house price guess: £400,000?), when they wafted our way. R Victoria would have heard them often. 

Even the single note ones associated with a certain kind of funeral strike me as more consoling than depressing. 

My newly-arrived 'Complete Poems of John Keats' (thank you Amazon) featured a particularly fine poem with a very different take on church bells. (I stumbled across it, accidentally, on first-footing). I suspect Richard Dawkins (who I know is a fan of Keats - though I've never heard him mention this sonnet) might like it too:

In my mildly militant atheist mid-Twenties, I'd probably have adopted that as my poetic anthem, had I known about it. Now, however, I feel 'melancholy' and 'gloomy' that, two hundred years after Keats predicted it (he was a bit premature), the Church (namely the Anglican church) does indeed seem to be dying like an outburnt lamp - and abruptly too. So abruptly, in fact, that it really can be called 'a collapse'. (The stats prove it).

More generally, the sea of faith's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" is draining away at a rate probably not seen ('wildly speculative historical guess' alert!) since the Romans lost their faith in Jupiter & Co. It's apparently even withdrawing at some considerable speed in the USA now...

...though in plenty of parts of the world, the sea either remains where it was or (the Muslim world especially) is attempting to be a tsunami.

What of  Keats's "fresh flowers" and "many glories of immortal stamp"? I'm guessing he was hoping nature and art would be the drivers of a new and truer spiritual awakening. That still doesn't seem to have happened, and probably never will (though, like Bartok, I'd happily cross myself in both of their names - if you added science and made it a trinity). 

Instead, here in Team GB Land (the Land of Gold), we've got barely-even-half-hearted claims of familiar Christian beliefs from many (hordes of whom still tick the 'Christian' box in the census - including most of my family), plus quite a bit of on-the-hoof spirituality (new paganism included), a small but noisy atheist battalion (plus quieter hangers-on, like me), a benign smattering of believers in Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, etc, and a dramatically-swelling contingent of Muslims, many of whom are more than happy to fall under their religion's own "black spell" and some of whom, alas, seek to cast that spell over the rest of us too. Their tide still seems to be coming in. 

Were he alive now, would Keats, like me, now feel in need of those church bells (which so dejected him at the time) to lift his melancholy? 

Plus the radiator joys and Lydian airs, of course. 

The perfect bias-free BBC day (Part I)

AdrianD posted a thought-provoking comment on our 'Daytime Radio 4' thread today:

AdrianD 24 March 2014 10:42

I’m not sure whether you, or anyone who contributes to this blog, has done this before, but I think it would be interesting to see what you thought a good, non-biased, day of BBC broadcasting might look like. Apologies if you have (please send a link). I know what I want to see less of – I was just wondering what you would like to see more of. Thanks.

Oddly (or otherwise) we have never done such a thing, but it really is an interesting idea, isn't it?

I shall write here as if I'm replying to AdrianD [which, I hope he won't mind], and continue with the theme over several posts as it will give me the chance to dig a little deeper into things, as the day in question provides a useful (if untypical) case study of BBC bias:

As you probably worked out from the blue bits of that post [and an earlier comment or so], I thought that much of Sunday 23 March 2014's Radio 4 output (or at least its daytime broadcasting) lived up to my idea of what a good, non-biased day of BBC broadcasting should be like.

It was one of the best days of BBC broadcasting that I've ever heard, and I fancied PARTIALLY defending it in that post as being atypically unbiased...though, by some accounts, I only made it look even worse for the BBC's reputation for impartiality!

Looking at this Sunday's Radio 4 methodically then...

I always like Bells on Sunday (5.45am): a bit of history & British geography - plus bells. Who, atheist or believer, hates church bells (except the odd noise-averse grump)? Two minutes of weekly bliss.

As I commented on an earlier thread, I thought this week's edition of Lent Talks (5.47am) made up for/balanced out Bonnie Greer's dreary effort the week before. Yes, the speaker made a left-wing point or two along the way, but that's only to be expected for the wife of the dean of Liverpool [Anglican] Cathedral these days. (See various surveys on the disconnect between the liberal C of E leadership and its more conservative membership). But, still, I liked her talk.

There are a few more episodes to go, so an assessment of whether it represents unbiased broadcasting will have to wait. My idea of unbiased BBC broadcasting would be that each programme surprised me in some way, from contrasting angles.

Has that usually happened with Lent Talks?

Too often, past series of Lent Talks have espoused concerns that seem (to me) to reflect with I think of as the BBC's natural biases.

Take last year's series: Its presenters were (1) a Thought for the Day liberal Anglican, (2) a Muslim, (3) a Labour baroness, (4) a well-connected charity worker, (5) a gay Jew who feels abandoned for being gay, and (6) a fiction writer.

That's the sort of thing that makes me write about BBC bias.

We'll see where the rest of this series goes.

Next up came that edition of Something Understood (6.05am) about which I wrote with such mixed feelings yesterday....

A great series, often a jewel among Radio 4's output, usually thoughtfully constructed yet whimsical...yes, such a programme would undoubtedly be a part of my kind of BBC broadcasting day. On a good day, it appeals to believers, non-believers, and those who lie somewhere in-between.

(Two Palestinian poets in two weeks though, and no Israeli poems for months?...oh dear (as I'm sure you'll agree, Adrian.))

Its main presenter has long been that nice Mark Tully (see Sue and myself's discussion of him here). Alongside him have been John McCarthy, Chris Brookes, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Tom Robinson, Lucy Mangan, & various BBC reporters (including the ever-excellent Samira Ahmed)...which is, undeniably, about as left-liberal a collection of people as you could gather together to host a weekly BBC Radio 4 programme.

Conservative voices need not apply it seems - a recurring theme with such BBC Radio 4 staples, as we shall see...

Pause for thought

So where are we now?

Just beginning Sunday morning on Radio 4, yet using it as our kind of BBC broadcasting day.

Praise so far then for Bells on Sunday and Lent Talks (and, therefore, both included in my model BBC day on the strength of this week's editions), balanced by qualified praise for Something Understood (only conditionally included, due to this week's lapses) - all set in the context of evidence-backed claims of left-liberal bias on the part of both Lent Talks and Something Understood.  (Deny that evidence if you can!)

Both of those provide easy-to-prove claims of BBC left-liberal bias [and, please!, feel free to ask me to go back over several years and prove it even more! ---- In fact, don't bother: I'll do it myself over the coming weeks!].

Next up came an edition of On Your Farm (6.35am) that had me hanging on its every word. 

It related the experiences of a farming family on the Somerset plains, and pushed no apparent agenda (just as I want it) whist so doing. The slow,-slowish,-suddenly fast, &, soon after, very-fast -indeed rise of the flood waters was made to hit home, as was exactly what it meant for the farmer, his family and his cattle. The willingness of British people to come to this good farmer's aid was something I found deeply reassuring.

The programme's presenter here was our old friend Charlotte Smith, whose past feminist agenda-pushing has provoked a pair of previous posts at "Is" (here and here). My vision of an unbiased BBC day of broadcasting would involve Charlotte reporting at she did here (rather than as she did there.) 

My ideal Sunday BBC schedule would have to include my pet project, Sunday (7.10am), as the idea of a religious current affairs programme at breakfast on Sunday morning appeals to even an atheist like me... but, oh, the eternal, devilish bias!...It's so off-putting.

Alan at Biased BBC has (by his own confession) moved his tanks onto my lawn today (good man!) by outlining his own feelings about the clear bias embedded in the latest edition of this most reliably liberal-biased of BBC Radio 4 programmes, and Chrish did the same in the comments field of my own thread about this programme. 

They both made explicit what I made implicit - that Sunday is strongly and instinctively left-liberal in orientation - something this blog has, if it has proved anything, has proved beyond doubt. (Surely? 73 posts about it, and counting!)

So, to keep on answering AdrianD...

...just what do I want from Sunday? What should it be doing in my perfect BBC day (while we're all drinking sangria in the park, hanging on, and reaping what we sow)?

Well, will I want is a range of views (from atheist to creationist, as it were) on matters religious, though with a central focus on mainstream Judeo-Christian beliefs. That wouldn't neglect Britain's new minority religions - Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism, etc - but nor would it make such a great fuss about just one of them at the expense of all the others...as this week's edition most certainly did. Nor would it ignore those who doubt or reject religious belief. 

It would also be the kind of programme that doesn't just push a liberal Catholic perspective on Catholic matters, or that prefers liberal Jews to Orthodox Jews (as guests), or that promotes left-wing causes and dismisses right-wing causes, or that advances socially liberal morality at the expense of socially conservative morality...or that...until this blog stopped it...promotes a left-leaning Catholic magazine at the expense of a right-leaning Catholic magazine in the most blatant way imaginable. 

I want Sunday to keep repenting of its sins, putting its rosary to good use, wearing its Sunday best and giving us an agenda-free buffet of religious affairs. (Mmm...cheese and pickles, sausage rolls, crisps, hot-cross buns and egg sandwiches).

Some of its features and reports already achieve that, of course. Too many don't though. 

Second pause for thought

So where are we now? 

Well, we're finding that the BBC can often be heavily biased, but that sometimes even those sometimes-biased (and biased in-only-one-direction) programmes - Lent Talks, Something Understood, On Your Farm and Sunday - can be good in parts and, on occasions, wonderful...and that such is the BBC for you.

We're still near the beginning of our perfect BBC day. ("You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else").

Over the coming days, we'll continue outlining what a good, non-biased, day of BBC broadcasting might look like. 

Will the way that real day, this Sunday, reflect those hopes? 

No flicking!! 

Oranges and Lemons

I've never heard the bells of St Clement Danes, The Strand, London before, even though I've been hearing about them since I was very young. This morning's Bells on Sunday put that omission right. Hear them while you can!

The Radio 4 presenter told us that it's believed that the tenth bell was added to allow the tune of Oranges and Lemons to be played. Which is nice. 

Sadly they didn't play Oranges and Lemons today, ringing out the changes on London Surprise Royal instead. Which is still nice.

I do like bells.

Heavenly Thoughts

I was up before the lark this morning, and listened to the Radio 4 programmes before Sunday too. 

They began, at 5.45am with Bells on Sunday. The last time I wrote about that programme it turned out the BBC had broadcast the wrong bells. The ensuing scandal shook Radio 4 to its very foundations, and an apology from network manager Denis Nowlan followed (on Feedback.) So hopefully this morning's bells really were those of St Andrew's Church in Hurstbourne Priors, Hampshire - and very lovely they were too. 

Then came the repeat of Wednesday night's Four Thought. As I've said before, the previews of Four Thought rarely tempt me to bother listening to the programme. They sound too often like the sort of thing you might read at the Guardian's Comment is Free. 

This week's episode, a talk by Professor Heaven Crawley of Swansea University, was exactly that kind of piece. Heaven was talking about refugees and asylum seekers, and wants us to be much nicer to them. She thinks our present hostility towards them is a bad thing, and that our concerns about immigration are pretty much unfounded. 

Of course she does. She'd hardly be giving a Four Thought talk on immigration if she thought otherwise, would she?

As evidence for that, it's only about a month since the last Four Thought talk on refugees and asylum seekers, and it came from someone with an almost identical outlook - sympathetic to migrants, wanting us all be be more welcoming, critical of the press and politicians for being unsympathetic, and thinking our concerns are unfounded. That talk was given by Agnes Woolley, an English lecturer at Lincoln University. 

And if you check back through the programme's archive you'll see that Radio 4 has never invited anyone onto Four Thought to give a talk on this subject from the opposing point of view. Never. 

The series is evidently called Four Thought for a reason - only those who share Radio 4's way of thinking on this kind of subject seem to get an invite.

BBC bias then. On a controversial issue. Over four whole series. Tut tut.

A (Sun)Day in the Life (of the BBC) - I.

As I'm prone to posting about BBC programmes broadcast on Sunday - especially Radio 4's Sunday - I thought it might be worth tracking a(n almost) whole Sunday's worth of Radio 4 programmes, and seeing what emerges. The following posts will be a blog diary of what results. (If I get bored, it will end prematurely).

Let's start at 5:43, this last Sunday. Yes, 5:43 in the morning, when you were all probably fast asleep, awaiting the arrival of your morning-after hangovers.

5:43 Bells on Sunday

I like bells on Sunday, and Bells on Sunday. 

Here we heard the eight bells of St Mary and St Chad in Brewood, Staffordshire, pealing out very brightly. Ah yes, timelessly English! Yet, with my classical music hat on, it also sounded a bit like the kind of upbeat American minimalism exemplified by the music of Michael Torke. (Thought I'd share that with you.) No mournful bells these.

The one snag, as ever, was that we were allowed to hear a mere two minutes of bell-ringing. That's nowhere near enough. (Another complaint to the BBC will be going in about that.) Scrap Broadcasting House and give us an hour of Bells on Sunday instead!

Talking of church bells, our vicar was walking to church this Sunday morning and spotted me working in the garden.

"Can't you hear those bells summoning you to church?" said the vicar.

"I'm afraid you'll have to speak a little louder, vicar!" I replied.

"CAN'T YOU HEAR THOSE BELLS SUMMONING YOU TO CHURCH?!" shouted the vicar.

"I'm sorry, vicar," I said, "I can't hear you because of those effing bells!"

5:45 Profile

This was an early morning repeat for a programme broadcast the evening before, profiling the SNP deputy first minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon. It was written and presented by BBC business reporter Lesley Curwen.

Sometimes it hard to imagine that the person being profiled by Profile would enjoy the experience of actually listening to the programme. This wasn't one of those occasions.

I would (figuratively-speaking) wager a small bet that Nicola will have been listening to it - especially as one of the programme's 'talking heads' was her own mum, Joan. If so, she will have had a pleasant quarter of an hour's worth of listening, hearing political friend and foe alike singing her praises. Besides Joan Sturgeon, we heard from her SNP colleague Fiona Hyslop, the political commentator David Torrance, and the (Lib Dem) coalition government minister Michael Moore.

Unusually, there was barely a shadow of sourness to be heard. Even Mr Moore was full of praise for her qualities as a politician.

The nearest we got to that elusive shadow was a hint that the very political Miss Sturgeon had a single, non-political obsession - that Danish...er...political drama Borgen (broadcast on BBC Four). That's hardly a bad thing of course. Such things humanise politicians - or, at any rate, are assumed to do. (Incidentally, Clive James also likes Borgen. He fancies the lead actress).

Nicola Sturgeon does appear to be a bit like a stick of SNP rock. She's been SNP since her mid teens, her mum's an SNP councillor and she's married to the present chief executive of the SNP.

The programme left us with the suggestion that the sky could be the limit for her, especially if the independence referendum goes her way.

Here's a joke that didn't appear on Profile but it's one that I'm sure (having a feel for such things) is guaranteed to have every red-blooded SNP supporter rolling in the Isles with laughter:

The SNP has stated today that every Scot would be six hundred pounds a year better off in an independent Scotland.

Or as it's been promoted north of the border...an extra 1300 units of alcohol.

In the next post (due this evening): Sunday, On the Farm and an edition of Something Understood which meditates on the subject of anticipation. Aren't you simply tingling with anticipation to read it?